Do you have your own homegrown fixes for tech problems? We want to hear about them. Feel free to add your favorites to the comments below. After everyone has weighed in, we’ll select some of the most useful and surprising for a “Best Tech Folk Remedies” roundup next week.

Your car is lost in a massive mall carpark outdoors. You can’t remember where you parked. You’re car-key wireless door opener should honk the horn to help you determine where your car is. You try pressing the button but nothing happens because you are out of range. Solution: put the wireless door opener on the side of your head/cranium. It extends the range of the wireless signal about twice – or more. It’s not an urban myth. BBC’s Top Gear demonstrated it – Jeremy Clarkson was quite stunned. It’s on YouTube. Now you know why your cellphone is capable of such a strong signal. : )

Freezing a stuck hard drive should be the last trick you try—because it will be the last trick you try. As the drive warms, moisture will condense inside it and after 15-30 minutes the drive will be likely irreparably damaged no matter what state it was in before it hit the freezer.

If you try this, put the drive in a freezer bag before putting it in the freezer to minimize condensation. Leave it overnight. In the morning, boot off of another drive and be ready to start getting the data you most want off the drive off the moment it spins up. Only then take the drive out of the freezer and try to spin it up.

But first, try the following. Twist the drive vigorously in the plane of rotation of the platters. If this fails, give a series of increasingly vigorous glancing taps on one of the “short” edges of the drive with a wooden or, better, rubber mallet (think freeing a stuck jar lid). These solve the most common problem, stuck heads, by freeing them mechanically. If it works, you should still back up the drive immediately, but you have a much longer window to do so. If it doesn’t, install the drive in a different bay or machine to solve the less common problem that the power supply or connector is bad.

As for chilling a cellphone, I’d guess you’ll prolong battery life even more when you go to use if and remember it’s in the minibar.

My digital camera was stowed away in my tackle box on the pier where I was doing some saltwater fishing one night. As I waded out on the pier into the incoming tide, the water slowly started infiltrating my tackle box. My digital camera was inoperable. So, here’s what I did. First, I removed the battery and memory card. Then I got out as much of the salt water as I could by shaking it by hand. Then I simply soaked the camera in distilled water over night. After letting it dry out for a couple of days, I put the batter back in, and it worked again – and has worked fine ever since!

I tried the same thing when my cell phone fell in the hot tub while on vacation. Disassemble, shake, soak, dry. While it never gained full operation, it was very functional until I could get a warranty replacement.

When I have a keyboard that is sticking, or misbehaving in other ways, I find that running it under a stream of water in the kitchen sink, and then letting it drain and dry for a few days does the trick. Lots of dust and other unwelcome junk can get under the key pads and needs to be flushed out.

Duct tape. If you can’t fix something with duct tape (and maybe some Krazy Glue), it’s probably game over. Technology today is too high-tech for at-home fixes, and that’s the point. If everyone went around fixing and upgrading their gadgets, who would be making money off our $500/year new-cellphone habit?

Culturally, the insistence is not on gizmos that work and are functional, but that are better than the neighbor’s, so really there’s no such thing as just fixing it at home.

Regarding the plastic bag credit card trick, Mr. Boutin expresses a certain skepticism that it does in fact work. My experience, and that of grocery store checkout ladies whom I have informally polled, is that it certainly does work, and works quite consistently on apparently undamaged or marginal cards that are otherwise unresponsive. But I’d really like to know WHY it works!

If you have a really old device that just won’t run right–no specific problem indicators, one old trick is just to take all the cards out of their slots and blow the connectors off with a can of compressed air (available at electronics stores but not at stores like Circuit City), then reassemble the device. Why does it work? Who knows! Sometimes fixes are like voodoo.

To stretch out the life of color inkjet cartridges, print personal documents in brown. Printing text in brown uses the color pigments in the cartridges evenly, and will save black ink for more ‘important’ documents.

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Gadgetwise is a blog about everything related to buying and using tech products. From figuring out which gadget to buy and how to get the best deal on it to configuring it once it’s out of the box, Gadgetwise offers a mix of information, analysis and opinion to help you get the most out of your personal tech.